Column by Dr. Richard Sternberg

Thermal Nuclear Fusion: A Christmas Hope

The most important news item of the 21st century occurred on Tuesday, December 13. It was not about the war in Ukraine. It was not about the U.S. political crisis or political crises anywhere else in the world. It had nothing to do with the ongoing three-year pandemic that we’ve gone through and which is now being exacerbated by epidemics of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and other diseases. The most important news item of the 21st century was the announcement by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California of the ability to create a thermal nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than it took to initiate it.

Allowing for the fact that there was additional energy needed to set up the experiment, the importance is that the actual reaction produced more energy than went into starting it.